


a much better dream

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, How To Join A Resistance Without Really Trying, Jedi Rey, Multi, POV Female Character, Post-Canon, Rebuilding, The Rise of Skywalker - Freeform, canon character death, reset
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21917530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Zorii Bliss joins the Resistance.***“Who are you?" Zorii asked."Rose Tico," said clipboard girl, “and I asked you first.”Zorii said that this was Babu Frik, and he was an excellent droidsmith, and she was Zorii - just Zorii - and she was good at fighting things and flying things, in-atmosphere for preference, and she'd already parked her yacht, thanks."You've landed it on top of a navigation sensor and I'm going to have to ask you to move it," Rose Tico said.
Relationships: Chewbacca & Leia Organa, Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey, Zorii Bliss & Poe Dameron, Zorii Bliss/Rose Tico
Comments: 69
Kudos: 327





	a much better dream

**Author's Note:**

> Reset is a sort of mourning and catharsis celebration I came up with in earlier fic and have hung onto because I'm fond of it.

Running off to join the Resistance was not as complicated as Zorii had expected. Sure, Poe had made it look easy. But Poe Dameron was Poe Dameron, and it hadn't taken much searching on Zorii's part to work out that he was the son of a pair of war heroes with connections, which made it all the more ridiculous that he'd ever come in her way ten years ago. He might have smoothed her way, Zorii supposed, but looking at him all wound up with the bloodied Jedi in white and the ex-stormtrooper fearless and stupid enough to lead a ground assault on a star destroyer in-atmo and win, she thought it much more likely he had forgotten about her entirely.

“Name please,” said a patient, weary voice, and Zorii turned around to find a stocky young woman with her hair in buns and a holographic clipboard, “and occupation, and then I can tell you where to berth that yacht. Isn't she pretty?"

“She's stolen goods," Zorii said, for some reason, and Babu Frik cackled at her.

“If you don't tell me things like that I don't have to know them," the clipboard girl sighed. She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Zorii, with the burned, capable hands of a really good hydraulics engineer, and she wore a half-moon necklace over her shirt that reminded Zorii of mining worlds she had avoided.

“Who are you?" Zorii asked.

"Rose Tico," said clipboard girl, “and I asked you first.”

Zorii said that this was Babu Frik, and he was an excellent droidsmith, and she was Zorii - just Zorii - and she was good at fighting things and flying things, in-atmosphere for preference, and she'd already parked her yacht, thanks.

"You've landed it on top of a navigation sensor and I'm going to have to ask you to move it," Rose Tico said.

Zorii thought about pointing out that she would park wherever she pleased because she could snap the lovely Miss Tico like a twig, but the words died on her lips, and she went to move the yacht.

Babu Frik laughed at her very hard and asked the world at large what exactly it was about pretty women who didn't give a shit about Zorii that made them so irresistible. Zorii told him, in the same dialect, to shut up.

***

The Resistance was 45% chaos. The other 55% seemed to be made up mostly of elderly veterans with a few tricks up their sleeves and Rose Tico's clipboard. Poe and Finn had named her Quartermaster-General, which Zorii had thought was a bit premature until the first time she'd seen Rose hook a depowered megaphone up to the charging crystal of Rey's lightsaber, allow Chewbacca to hoist her onto his shoulders, and start yelling. It turned out that Rose could and would organise anything, from the surprisingly effective plumbing to the accommodation of visiting dignitaries. It was amazing to Zorii that there were any dignitaries left in the galaxy after the destruction of the Hosnian system, or that they dared to show their faces before Poe, Rey and Finn after letting their general down, but there were quite a lot of wealthy and important people who wanted to prove they had never had anything to do with the First Order. Or the Final Order, or whatever that dried-up old Sith had been calling his shitty little retirement project.

Poe threw things - carefully pre-selected by Rey - at the walls, Rey sat in the forest around their latest base meditating while rocks spun double helixes about her still form, and Finn muttered and swore and ground out negotiating terms with General Calrissian, who liked his style. Rose Tico organised some nice clean tents and didn't flinch when the head of the Mining Guild showed up, anxious to prove he had never once offered favourable terms to Brendol and Armitage Hux.

“You don't have to do this," Zorii said, hanging around like a bad smell while Rose gave orders for some compulsory tidying up and no drinking in front of the guests. “I know you hate the guy."

"Who says I hate the guy?" Rose snapped.

Zorii had literally not once not ever heard Rose snap, not even when Rey accidentally cut a very significant water pipe and drenched a formerly immaculate region of their rapidly growing base. She nearly fell off her perch.

“There are just some things about winning this war that I don't like," Rose continued, in a softer voice.

“Who says we're not winning?" Zorii countered.

"Nobody," Rose said, and put her clipboard down with a sigh to run her hands through her hair and retie it. “But I used to spend a lot of time with the General, you know -“ the General, Zorii had realised, was always Leia Organa, not those who came after her or those who walked beside her - “and she told me a lot of things about how they used to think they'd won."

And if we don't act now they will all have died for nothing, Zorii heard, in the silence behind Rose's words. That was one of the things that Rose kept having to explain to newcomers, the sheer weight of death lying across the shoulders of everyone who had come this far. Zorii had taken to knocking down new troublemakers and explaining it to them, pre-emptively, so as to spare Rose the bother and Poe the spiking blood pressure; Finn seemed to handle it well, his stormtrooper upbringing lending him a weird and frankly unnerving detachment, and Rey was so otherworldly that most people were afraid to say anything to her at all, but the rest of the Resistance's fledgling leadership was not so lucky. Everyone who had been in the Resistance for more than five minutes put together had more ghosts than living kin - friends, family or neither.

“Well, come on," Zorii said, unable to resist. “It won't be so bad. You won't be alone.”

Rose's smile was a pale half-echo of the crescent moon that hung round her neck. “The General said that, too.”

***

“What are you doing?" demanded Rey, immediately after falling over Zorii's outstretched feet and saving herself with a slick twist in midair that reminded Zorii of nothing so much as otters in water.

“Just hanging about,” Zorii said insolently. “I thought Jedi could sense people in the Force?"

"Using the Force for things like that is frivolous," Rey said. “Supposedly.” She looked down at Zorii, playing solitaire outside the door to a dusty briefing room, and Zorii wondered if she looked as if she always knew things because she was a Jedi or because - growing up a scavenger on a dustball - knowing things was a survival imperative. Zorii felt again that faint tug towards her that was either a crush of the highest order or just being very impressed by a woman with style, weapons and great core strength.

“Rose is still in there," Rey said.

“Yeah? Got a question for her."

Rey waved at the door, and it opened. This annoyed Zorii, who had already spent twenty minutes trying and failing to break in. She just knew that goddamned pre-Clone Wars astromech was fucking laughing at her.

Still, she got up and put her foot over the threshold. “Look out for Poe, won't you?" she said to Rey. “You and Finn."

Rey had a smile like rising suns - lifegiving, dangerous, and both very remote and very present. Some of Zorii's crushes were a lot more predictable than others. “I always do."

“He says you’re the bane of his life," Zorii informed her.

Rey's face crunched into a much more human and mischievous grin. “Yeah, but he likes it."

Zorii left this where it was, and entered the room before the doors could close again.

The briefing room was plastered with new posters, new holos, new prototypes, and on a great table in the centre with one leg propped up by an old datapad a soundbite was revolving round and round: a polished version of the rough audio file that Lando Calrissian had broadcast around the galaxy, piggybacking the frequency that Palpatine had used to terrify the galaxy into submission. Even Zorii knew all the clips, from long-gone history lessons and replications in popular holos; Padmé Amidala shading into Jyn Erso and Leia Organa, women of the undying flame, and then Lando Calrissian's own gravelly, warm and friendly voice, giving the final coordinates for the Battle of Exagal.

_Who are we fighting for? My people, your people, all of our people!_

_The time to fight is now!_

_You are my only hope._

There were people sitting at the table, slumped around it, and people standing before the posters and the repeating clips that would be played on the holonet, wherever the Resistance could find space. There were still battles to be won; the First Order had risked much of their manpower on Palpatine's secret fleet, but far from all of it, and there were those among them who refused to believe there had ever been anything in the Unknown Regions but one of Kylo Ren's funny turns. That kind of attitude made Rey's mouth turn thin, and even Finn couldn't explain quite why it bothered her since Kylo Ren had been a war criminal and Rey had despised him, but Zorii had never seen anyone as angry as Rey so definitely refuse to hate.

Also she'd sneaked about enough to see Rey and Chewbacca lighting a fire together, and talking about Ben Solo, whose name nobody else would speak. Zorii had done a lot of sneaking.

Zorii did not bother to sneak now. She admired the posters of Poe's enviable jawline, and the clips of Rose talking, very earnestly, about saving what we love; she eyed the image of General Leia Organa passing a torch that said she had lived and died in service to freedom, and listened to Poe saying _every cannon gone is another planet save_ d, over a montage of ordinary people carrying out small acts of rebellion. A silhouette of Rey clasped hands with the silhouette of a child and ignited a lightsaber, and behind them silhouettes peopled a world; _we are not alone_. Finn and Jannah raised their heads, set their shoulders, and held their Resistance-issue blasters like stormtroopers: _there is always a choice_.

Very fetching.

She skirted around Wedge Antilles snuffling over an animated clip that featured Luke Skywalker, and Poe with his head bent and his shoulders shaking over one of those images of Leia Organa, and then she found Rose sitting cross-legged and stock-still before a recruiting picture of a woman with the same eyes but narrower cheekbones, a dark blue bomber's cap on her head and her helmet under her arm, and the matching half-moon necklace peeping out from her orange jumpsuit.

“Oh," said Zorii, who, if she was honest, had known about this all along.

_For our tomorrow, she gave her today._

“It's not accurate," Rose said, her voice tired and scratchy. “Paige always kept her necklace tucked in."

“Right," Zorii said.

"It's stuffy in here," Rose said.

“Sure,” Zorii said, and went around opening windows and unplugging the goddamned holoprojector in the centre of the room, cutting off Jyn Erso mid-impassioned speech. Zorii had read about Jyn Erso, since joining the Resistance, and felt that Erso would have given her a very satisfying fight for that.

“I could use a drink," Rose said, and for some fucking reason, Zorii went and bullied the galley staff into bringing water and juice and caff to the stupid briefing room.

“Thank you," Rose said, smiling at her wearily, and Zorii thought _oh: that's why_.

***

“Hey,” Poe said, after a briefing. “You and Rose.”

“What?” Zorii snapped.

Poe raised his hands hastily. “Nothing, nothing, forget I ever said anything.”

“You'd fucking better,” Zorii said. “ _General_.”

***

Reset posed a problem. It was not one which had exercised Zorii, because she couldn't remember ever celebrating it - she'd never lived anywhere that cared about the destruction of Alderaan as anything other than a nasty but distant historical event, and had consequently never memorialised it - but it was one which repeatedly sent Poe to pieces, stymied Finn and Rey, and silenced General Calrissian and Admiral Antilles. Zorii wouldn't have cared all too much about that, either, but after the first time someone said “- and we'll have to work out who can light the flame of remembrance, since the General is no longer with us to do it -“ Chewbacca let out a frankly desolate roar and stormed off to get drunk. The ensuing cascade of problems were all Rose's problems, which meant, by a logical process of extension, that they were Zorii's problems too.

“This is fucking stupid,” Zorii said, dropping her end of the stretcherful of Wookiee onto the cradle that would make the stretcher into a cot.

Rose, who had been walking beside the stretcher, gave her a very put-upon look. Zorii was getting used to that kind of disapproving expression, and found she was much less impervious to it than she had been to swearwords and death threats. “Chewie just lost the General. She's been - she was his leader since she was nineteen, they were family, they stood by each other. He had nobody left but her - and she was so young to die, hardly even sixty, Force-sensitive humans can live to twice that -“

“Not that," Zorii said, pulling Rose out of the way as a medic leapt forward to deal with the inevitable consequences of the ethanol Chewbacca had consumed. “I'm not arguing with that. Although you know, for someone who kept trying to kill Dark Lords, she had a pretty good run. I'm saying the whole argument about Reset is stupid. Just because General Organa always lit the remembrance flame didn't mean it would always be that way. Get Finn to do it. He's very symbolic and he'll look very noble. Unlike Poe, who will cry. And unlike Rey he doesn't get stage fright.”

Rey was so blindingly competent that it reassured Zorii very much that her response to awed dignitaries was usually to claim Jedi business and leave by the nearest window.

“That’s - that's actually a really good idea,” said Rose, and made it happen.

Zorii had never given a damn about Reset before, but she had to admit it was one hell of a party.Finn had given his speech very well, the bonfire had gone up in flame very satisfactorily, the media had been hustled out, ordered off, and in one case physically removed from the premises, and the food and alcohol had started to flow freely. There was dancing and music and a lot of very attractive people dressed up to show off their best assets, and Babu Frik - who had ditched Zorii very quickly after finding his niche among the mechanics - was holding court with Threepio and talking about how he, personally, had saved the Resistance. Zorii bypassed this, and climbed onto a suitable perch to listen to Chewbacca tell the story of the Rebellion from the day he had picked up a fare consisting of a scrawny old wizard and a naïve farm boy in a Mos Eisley cantina. It was a good story. Zorii's listening comprehension of Shryiiwook was improving. But she understood even better the sad warm look on General Calrissian's face, and the loss in his voice as he said: “She really was something, Chewie. They really were something. Weren’t they?"

Chewbacca howled.

“I'd like to believe what Rey says,” Calrissian continued. “About Ben. Well, if Luke could do it for Vader -“

Chewbacca howled something else, of which Zorii understood only the grief. She cleared off in a hurry and looked for somewhere else to sit.

Rose Tico was sitting by herself halfway up a tree. Zorii threw caution to the winds and joined her.

“Nice work,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Rose, who had the nicest manners of anyone Zorii had ever met, even if she had once allegedly whacked an injured Finn with a hydrospanner. (Zorii had trouble believing it, but Rose guiltily insisted it was true.)

“Everyone looks very happy.”

“That's what I was aiming for,” Rose said, with a pretty sad attempt at gaiety, and leaned her head on Zorii's shoulder. Zorii put an arm around her.

They sat in companionable silence for a few moments, and then Rose chuckled and said: “Look at them tearing up the dance floor.”

Zorii looked, and smiled herself. Finn and Rey and Poe were whirling around each other like a set of beautiful tornadoes, still dressed in white, and they were all fine dancers in tune with each other on some level beyond mere mortals like Zorii; maybe it was the Force, or maybe it was all the obvious sexual tension. “Handsome trio.”

“Aren’t they,” Rose said, and sighed. “I used to think me and Finn, but... they orbit around each other so tightly, and half the time they don't even know it. I didn't want to be a part of that. It wouldn’t have worked.”

Zorii wondered if she was drunk, to be admitting to this, but didn't say so. She held Rose a little more tightly. “You deserve better than that," she said, and grinned. “Come to think of it, I used to think me and Poe, and I deserve better than that.”

As Zorii had hoped, Rose laughed. “Is it true you knew Poe when he was a spice runner?”

Zorii grinned again. “Kind of. It's mostly a joke. One of Poe's Naval Academy friends got in way over his head with one of these posh-kid too-much-money-no-sense sidelines, you know the kind of thing, and Poe was too stupid to know what was going on until it was too late. Sheltered upbringing, I guess. And then he was too good a pilot and knew too much for the Crew to let him go easily. His parents got him out of it in a couple of months, but he did get stuck with a suspended sentence, and his friend nearly got sent to Kessel. Ten years ago, though, it's probably expired.”

“Is that all?” Rose said blankly.

“Yeah,” Zorii said, unable to smother her grin. “He just hates it when I call him a spice runner. So obviously I do it all the time.”

Rose laughed until she cried and nearly fell out of the tree. Zorii dropped her drink in order to catch Rose, who clung to her still laughing, and did not think it was a bad deal.

“Were you mad he got away?” Rose asked, when she’d wiped her tears. “Is that why you do it?”

Zorii shook her head. “Nah. Couldn't be angry at him for that. I always wanted out myself. I ran a fucking blockade just to get out. Just before they got Kijimi...”

They were silent for a moment. Zorii had personally hated every brick and stone of Kijimi, and had not named it in her remembrance, but it was still dead and gone and that felt wrong.

“I wanted to get out and make a life somewhere," Zorii continued. “Without a mask. Somewhere I didn't need a mask. You?”

“Oh, same,” Rose said quietly, laughter gone. “Paige and I used to say once the war was won, we'd go home... where home was before, I mean... and we'd fix ships. A little garage somewhere in a nice town. Speeders and jalopies and things.” She rubbed her hands on her thighs. “I might still do it. Once the war is won.”

Zorii thought it was much more likely that if the war ever did get won Rose would end up with an apartment in Coruscant, a fancy job title, and a hundred billion committees to contend with, but the little garage in a nice town was honestly a much better dream.

“Sounds good,” she said, and swallowed hard. “Room for another one?"

Rose gave her a sudden clear-eyed glance, and maybe - unlike everyone else in Zorii's life - she liked what she saw, because she reached over and wrapped Zorii's hand in her own strong fingers. “Always.”

Zorii breathed in deep and smiled at her, dizzily. She twined her fingers with Rose's, and held on tight.

“You're still not allowed to park your yacht on the navigation sensors,” Rose said, and kissed her.


End file.
